


a gunpowder hymn for the dead

by astrolatryy



Category: Halloween Movies - All Media Types
Genre: Aftermath, Canonical Character Death, Grief/Mourning, Guns, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Moving On, Shooting Guns, all other movies are not canon to this, both mentally and physically, local final girl learns how to use a pistol, no beta we die like michael myers' victims, set directly after the events of the OG halloween and halloween 2, written at 3 am after inspiration smacked me on the back of the head
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-29
Updated: 2020-10-29
Packaged: 2021-03-08 19:08:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27261742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astrolatryy/pseuds/astrolatryy
Summary: On the third day after the nightmares start, she visits Sheriff Brackett at his home.She rings the doorbell and the door opens and Brackett recognizes her with a start—there's something sad in his eyes as he looks down at her and asks her what she needs."I want to learn how to fire a gun," she tells him.-Laurie Strode moves on.
Kudos: 5





	a gunpowder hymn for the dead

She has nightmares, after that Halloween.    
  
Laurie is no stranger to them—she's had them for a long, long while now—but there's something uniquely horrible about waking up in the middle of the night and feeling the phantom pressure of hands around her neck.    
  
( _ They hadn't meant for her to overhear them talking about the autopsy. They didn't even know she was there to listen—she's always had a talent for hiding without really meaning it. Something about her is quiet and unassuming and easy to miss.  _ _  
_ _  
_ __ _ Annie was strangled in her car, from the bruise marks. By hand; there were crescent marks over her cheek and they assumed she had a hand clapped over her mouth while he did it. That wasn't the thing that killed her, though—the knife was. Her body had a slit across the throat and she bled out in seconds. _ _  
_ _  
_ __ _ Lynda had a phone cord wrapped around her neck and that's when Laurie made her presence known with an intentionally loud footstep because she knew how she died, anyways—heard her choke and squall and had done nothing,  _ **_done nothing_ ** _ —and the survivor's guilt tore at her chest like claws. )  _ _  
_ _  
_ __ On the third day after the nightmares start, she visits Sheriff Brackett at his home.    
  
She rings the doorbell and the door opens and Brackett recognizes her with a start—there's something sad in his eyes as he looks down at her and asks her what she needs.    
  
"I want to learn how to fire a gun," she tells him.   
  
There's surprise in his eyes as he blinks and does a bit of a double-take but (and this is the thing she's always liked him for; the way he  _ listens  _ to everyone and never dismisses their concerns) nods, after a little bit.    
  
"Suppose I can't blame you for wanting that," he says, and turns and waves her in. "Come on in."   
  
He teaches her in the backyard with a BB gun—explained to her that the principle was the same but the air-powered gun was a lot quieter and wouldn't draw attention from the neighbors.    
  
At first, he teaches her the rules. He tells her to always assume a gun is loaded until she's checked the chamber herself, because even when the magazine is out there's still a chance someone left a bullet in the chamber. He tells her what the safety is, what it looks like, how to toggle it—and then he tells her that older guns might not have one, and teaches her to never,  _ ever  _ point the gun at something she isn't intending to shoot, and to never put her finger on the trigger until she's ready to pull it.    
  
Then, he teaches her how to load the gun. How to load the magazine, how to put it in the gun (and how to take it out), how to pull the top of the gun back to chamber a round.    
  
After that, he tells her how to line up the sights, how to aim properly—has her aim down those iron sights at a can set up on a fence posts, and tells her to fire when ready.    
  
She lines up the sights and pulls the trigger. It feels almost like the gun never fired. It hardly kicks back in her hand, nothing like the old westerns Tommy liked to watch sometimes when babysitting—but a hole appears in the can's aluminum, and it topples off the post with the force.    
  
And she was expecting her hands to shake, handling a weapon again, like they did when there was something in the shape of a man hunting her down; but they feel as steady as ever, and she looks at the post where the can was and tightens her grip a little and feels something like power (like safety) as she lays her finger along the trigger guard and exhales.    
  
Brackett lays his hand on her shoulder. "Good job," he says, and makes her lower the gun to her side before he goes to put another can on the post.    
  
A few days after that, she looks over her father's shoulder while he's putting in the combination for the gun safe. She sets her alarm clock for an early hour in the morning far before the sun has risen and gets up in the middle of the night. It's easy enough to put in the memorized combination and steal the gun from the safe.    
  
It feels heavier in her hands than she was expecting, being a real gun and not something with an orange tip. She hefts it a little and wraps her fingers around the grip; she lays her finger against the trigger guard and her breath catches in her throat.    
  
This is a weapon. This can  _ kill _ .    
  
And she knows she's seen the Shape take six shots to the chest and fall from a second story building and still survive, and she knows she's set him on fire but knows just as surely that  _ he's still out there _ , that a thing like him will never die, but—   
  
—she can fight back, now.    
  
And if he can survive six shots to the chest? She'll just keep shooting until he can't stand up any more, and then she'll figure out a way to cut his goddamn head off.    
  
She attends Brackett's lessons all the same. Still walks through his house to the backyard and fires a BB gun at aluminum cans. They mourn, together; she sees the sadness in his eyes and the way he walks past a particular door in the house that she knows is—was,  _ was _ —Annie's, the same way she knows he probably sees the way her heart breaks every time she walks through the house and it feels so  _ empty.  _   
  
_ I miss you.  _   
  
But in the dead of night, when nobody else is awake, she sneaks out to the woods and sets up cans of her own and fires something real. Something  _ heavy _ —something loud. She didn't know how loud guns could be; the first time she fired it and it kicked against her head she nearly dropped the damn thing because she thought one of the neighbors would hear how the gunshot echoed out through the trees.   
  
But, God, the recoil makes it feel like if she aimed it at something human they would go down without being able to flinch; the way her hands smell of gunpowder and lead after she sneaks back into the house and goes to wash her hands makes her feel like the weapon is a part of her.   
  
She thinks she knows why people name their guns.    
  
Something about knowing it's there helps. It makes her feel a little less lonely, in the dark hours of the night. Sometimes, even when she's not intending to go out and practice with it, she'll sneak downstairs and open the safe just to hold it in her hands.    
  
_ Never again _ , she thinks as she looks down at the metal casing, tracing a finger over the muzzle.  _ Never again.  _   
  
The school reopens a week after the incident, after giving people time to grieve, time to adjust. The halls were once so bustling; she remembers all too well shrinking from the noise, letting herself be flanked by Annie and Lynda and their endless, teasing chatter to make her feel a little safer.    
  
Now she doesn't have them there to make her feel safe (not like it matters, when the students are quiet and tense, murmuring to each other in hushed whispers and shying away from her), and—God.    
  
At first it felt like they were just on the other side of the school. It felt like they were just… busy with something else, or kept after class for detention, and the lie was paper-thin but she clung to it anyways, because they didn't feel like they could be gone. They didn't feel like they could be dead; she felt like she had just seen them yesterday.    
  
And then she's walking down the hall to chemistry, which they all shared together, and she remembers a day where they were talking about an upcoming test and all but begging her to let her share her notes with them because they were going to  _ totally  _ bomb this test otherwise—and she shifts an arm a little as if to elbow one of them in the side and it hits her.    
  
_ They're not coming back.  _   
  
The grief crashes into her and it's overwhelming, all-consuming, and her vision blurs with tears and she stumbles against a locker and sinks to the ground, knees against her chest, and  _ sobs.  _   
  
"They're gone, they're gone, oh, God, they're gone…" she murmurs to herself, rocking against the cool metal pressing against her back and one hand tugging at her sleeve—and even when the tardy bell rings she just sits there, crying so hard her chest begins to ache and her face feels sore, and she presses the back of her head against the locker and stares up at the ceiling and wishes so badly that she's just having another nightmare about losing them.    
  
But no awakening comes, and Lynda doesn't come to tug her up off her feet and offer her a distraction, or Annie doesn't come and offer her something from her lunch bag, (her mother baked brownies for her sometimes and they were the best in the world and remembering that makes her cry a little harder) and in fact the only thing that happens is a teacher finding her in the empty halls and gently guiding her into his room so she can cry without anyone seeing her.    
  
( and that makes her feel a little less alone, she guesses, but something about the way compassion shines in his eyes as he lets her sit in her chair and sits across the room while she cries only makes her miss them that much more.    
  
he isn't them. he'll never be them—there is no replacement for the people she's lost. )   
  
And when she comes home after school, she sets her homework aside and curls up on her bed and cries some more, sobs her heart out and wraps her arms around her chest, tears tracking their way down her face and staining her blouse and the sheets, and the next morning her parents tell her she doesn't have to go to school that day.    
  
Which is a good thing, because she was planning to ask anyways, because so much of her  _ aches  _ with the thought of Annie and Lynda and the way she didn't feel alone around them like she does now and the way that even though she wasn't friends with anyone else in the school she managed to be friends with  _ them  _ and the thought that she's going to be alone for the rest of her life, now—the thought that haunts her and makes her weep and scream into her pillow so nobody else will hear because—because with the way people shied away from her in the halls and leaned towards their friends and whispered about her, she knew she was never going to be seen as anything more than a spectre of the thing that hunted the town that Halloween night.    
  
Late in the afternoon of that day, she goes out to the gun store and tries on a few holsters before picking one that nestles nicely into the waistline of her pants and doesn't show when she puts her blouse over it, and even though the guy at the register gives her a strange look, (because she may carry herself with something fiery but she's clearly not an adult) the only thing in the store she's not legally allowed to buy are the guns themselves.    
  
She walks out with the holster still tucked under her waistline and when she opens the safe that night and slips the .45 into it, it fits like a charm.    
  
It's not a replacement for the people she's lost, but she hopes— _ God _ , she hopes—that it'll save anyone else from losing someone.    
  
Three weeks after that Halloween, her parents tell her they're moving.    
  
They've found a nice property in Indiana, and a good job there to boot, and, well, with everything that happened here…    
  
"We thought it would be a nice change of pace," her mother tells her. An escape from everything that haunts her here.    
  
Part of her sings at the opportunity. Part of her screams— _ yes, yes, get me away from this place, I'm tired of being reminded of them _ .    
  
Part of her remembers how she knows her bro—the thing that stalked the town isn't dead. Part of her remembers how she knows without a shadow of a doubt that  _ he will come back _ , whether it be in a week or a month or a year or three years, that inevitably he will come looking for her again. He will kill to get to her, and then he'll try to kill her, too. He might even succeed.    
  
She's seen the haunted looks in students' eyes as she walks down the halls of the school. She's seen the way they flinch away from her, as if she, too, carried a knife.    
  
She's seen the way that some of them flinch away from anyone, anyone at all, terrified.    
  
Some part of her wonders if Tommy would grow up the same way she has.    
  
Some part of her knows her parents would never believe her. They love her, and she loves them, (loves them almost desperately, now that she knows what she knows) but they wouldn't believe that  _ he  _ wasn't dead.    
  
So she says, "That sounds nice," while pretending to read a book, and then says, "What town?"    
  
"Hawkins," her father says, and the name means nothing to her but she notes to herself to look it up when she has the time.    
  
A few days before they move out, she hears her father mention selling the gun in the safe and she knows how forgetful he can be so she sneaks downstairs one last time and enters the combination and takes it for herself.    
  
She notices the way it shines in the moonlight as she carries it upstairs to her room and hides it under the mattress, for now, and lingers a little on the thought that she hasn't named it, yet.    
  
She'll think of something eventually, she promises herself; and when she goes to bed that night the promise of protection lying beneath her lulls her to sleep, and for once she doesn't dream of hands around her throat and a blade slicing down her shoulder.    
  
The day before they move out is a Saturday, but she goes to the school anyways. It's late in the afternoon and the sun is beginning to drift below the horizon, the autumn breeze cold and damp, and her feet crunch through dead leaves as she walks in and walks the empty halls one last time.    
  
She doesn't cry, this time, but as she walks, something hollow settles in her chest and doesn't seem to want to let go. Her footsteps echo a little through the hallways; automatically, she finds herself counting the sets, listening to see if anyone is following her.    
  
But the steps ringing against the tile continue to belong to her and her alone, and all Laurie is left with in the end is a lingering feeling of melancholy.    
  
The phantom of students laughing, calling out to each other and talking together in a rising din brushes across her memory, but today the school is silent save for her.    
  
How many times has she walked these halls? How many times has she passed through the doors of these classrooms; looked out the windows at lunch and laughed alongside—   
  
—alongside Annie and Lynda?    
  
Some part of her  _ aches  _ at the thought that she's leaving all of this behind. The thought that she won't be back here, at least not for a long while. Her heart feels heavy in her chest.    
  
The majority of her remembers the quiet of students afraid for their lives after what happened in this town, the way they huddled against each other and looked over their shoulders—remembers the gravestones erected in the cemetery, bodies laid to rest, (she'd left flowers there for a week straight, cried over the stone; sometimes Brackett and Lynda's mother were there to mourn, too) and knows she's already left behind something she can't get back.   
  
When she walks through the doors and leaves the school behind, she doesn't look back.    
  
Not once.

  
  



End file.
